a question about opposites.....sorry, english is not my mother tounge...?

Question

My second question is about opposites. I hear many people say that to have peace on must have war, cold - heat, etc.But I was wondering who defines opposites but ourselves. Arent opposites defined by our own limitation and what are opposites but two sides of the same coin. like cold a lesser form of heat. So who says opposites need each other? the universe we live in is a dynamic one, so opposites are understood through variations of intensity, like different levels of frequencys. So who can say there are two set of opposites that need each other to exist? who says that it is not more like a circle where there are no bounderies, we define the bounderies? I understand that to know cold one needs heat, but where does heat end and cold start?
good and bad, are they not the result of each other? if one has no good, one has no bad, so peace is a reaction of war, or rather peace is war made less intense? could the concept or abstract of good and bad be destroyed, and would that not be peace

Answer 1

I have some thoughts about what you have said. Please know that I mean no offense by my comments. I am simply telling what your thoughts made me think.

To me, you are saying an amoral world would have peace. An amoral world doesn't exist.

How can you destroy the abstract of good and bad? People still commit acts: murder, kindness...To talk about the reality of our existence requires opposites. They are juxtaposed. The good sheds light that the bad is bad. The heat shows us the cold is cold. You are saying bad is good if we take away the boundaries. Are you willing to say that if I came and kicked you, stabbed you, and mutilated you, that that could be good because it was less intense than if I had kicked you, stabbed you, mutilated you, and spit on you? Get real!!

In my opinion, for this idea to have any merit, everyone would have to cease to exist. You are speaking of nothingness.

Answer 2

You're right about hold and cold because there's no such thing as cold. Cold is lack of heat. We think of them as opposites because we have bodies that do well or poorly outside of a very limited range of temperature. So that's simply comparison (65 degrees F. is hot in winter but cold in summer).

But I don't believe that holds for most of your examples. For instance, love and hate can be considered two sides of the same coin, the coin being passion.

I believe that peace is not the lack of war (although war helps us to appreciate peace). Peace is more than not-violence. There's inner peace, which is a definite state of being. Maybe your comparison would be clearer if you used violence and non-violence instead of war and peace? I'm not sure.

Opposites probably are part of existence in 3-dimensional and material reality. In a more spiritual reality, opposites might not be sensed as strongly. There would be less differentiation.

Answer 3

When people see some things as beautiful,
other things become ugly.
When people see some things as good,
other things become bad.

Being and non-being create each other.
Difficult and easy support each other.
Long and short define each other.
High and low depend on each other.
Before and after follow each other.
--Tao Te Ching


It may be... it may be peace in the way that the law of entropy will bring peace: that when all heat is evenly spaced throughout the universe, there can be no more chemical reactions and therefore, no life.

I agree all those things are relative. I live in Phoenix. I have somewhat different definitions of hot and cold than people who live where it snows. But I have no desire to never have a change in temperature, because what would there be to feel?

Answer 4

In my religion, there is a saying that "it must needs be that there is an opposition in all things." This was a difficult concept to understand at first, but after some pondering, it actually makes perfect sense. However, opposites come through experience. We understand that something makes us happy, because we've experienced something else that makes us feel sad. How could something be considered "evil" unless there is universal standard for "good". God set our laws universally.

If you read the Bible, and understand religion in general, the concept is very dualistic... birth/death, good/evil, heaven/hell. What gives us so much contraversy in this world, is that we shun the universal truths given by God and seek our own "good" and "evil". As a result, we will never fully agree on everything, and we will continue to experience these opposites.

Consider it this way... what gives you ultimate joy in life? If you really love going to amuzement parks, what would it be if life were an amuzement park... would you always experience happiness and joy by riding all of the rides over and over again? No... eventually, you'd get bored... you'd want greater thrills... you take your life for granted and no longer experience the joy of the park. We need to experience opposites in order to learn from our mistakes and eventually find true happiness.

Answer 5

The sort of dualistic thinking, where the world is divided into pairs of things, is probably the influence of Zoroastrianism on Christianity. That religin posits that good and evil (Ahura Mazda and Ahriman) are more or less equal and opposite forces duking it out. Christianity has its own Jesus and Satan figures, which have survived down the years.

Even smart people like Descartes get caught up in assuming an equal and opposite of everything, and hence philosophical dualism (stating that minds are a different kind of substance).

That sort of thing is completely out of fashion with virtually all modern philosophers, but it still have popular appeal because religion promotes it.

Really, though, it's what's known as a category error, where you confuse what *type* of thing you're talking about.

Answer 6

I don't know if I'll be able to answer everything, but I want to point out that what you think of as "opposites" is not, in reality, an opposite, but a lack.

For instance, is cold the opposite of heat? Try to follow my reasoning here. Cold is actually the ABSENSE of heat, not the OPPOSITE of heat. You can remove heat from a body until there is no more atomic motion - that would be absolute zero. You can not ADD any cold to this. We say something is cold for the sake of relative convenience. The water is too cold, the room is too hot, etc. But scientifically, and technically, cold is not something you can add to. Like I already pointed out, you can only remove the heat from an object, but you can not add any more cold to it once all the heat is gone.

The same is true of light and darkness. Once you remove all the light from a room, you can not add any more darkness. Darkness is not the opposite of light, but the absense of light.

FInally, bad (or evil) is not the opposite of good, but (again) the ABSENSE of good. You can remove the "good" from a person's life until there is absolutely no more good left in him or her. As you continue removing "good", that person is called "BAD", or "WORSE" (like saying a room is "darker" or "colder"), but like cold and dark, "evil" is the absense of "good", and once there is no more good (or goodness) in a person, you can not add more "evil".

The same can be said of war and peace, or more accurately, inner turmoil and peace. When peace is removed, inner turmoil is the results, which leads to war either on a national or local level. On a local level, it can be called violence among gang members or between two gangs. On a national level or international level, it is referred to as war.

I hope this answers your question sufficiently. Remember, Jesus said "Peace I leave with you. MY peace I give to you. Not as the world gives (which is temporary at best)" ...

Answer 7

i like you ur deep,but true and for this not to be your mkother language you did a excellent job.trust me i know i teach english to hispanics who know very little so that they can get around without too much trouble.it may not sem that way by how im typing but im not trying to give too much to read.anyways i think that you are absolutely correct and that you have a higher level of intellect than alot of others who offend you because of what you said.you are the type of person i would like to talk to more often. i love having debates over things like this and i want to let you know that i am on your side about this conflict of thought 100%!your perception includes alot of thought and i like it.i hope that you find the answer to your question that you want even if its not mine.buenos suerte.

Answer 8

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Answer 9

opposites are not needed for one to exist
it is only needed to understand them

we could have peace
but would we appreciate that peace without a comparison ?

Answer 10

Nothing is either good or bad in itself. It is our thinking that makes it so. This dualistic thinking is merely a mental construct. A mere concept. Good question.